American Federation of Labor

The American Federation of Labor (AFL) was a national umbrella organization of autonomous craft (trade) unions formed in December 1886 at a convention in Columbus, Ohio, with Samuel Gompers as its founding and long-serving president. It emerged from the earlier Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (1881) and rose to prominence as the rival Knights of Labor declined after the Haymarket Affair of May 1886. Unlike the Knights, which sought to organize all workers—skilled and unskilled, regardless of trade—into one body, the AFL deliberately restricted membership to skilled craftsmen organized along trade lines, preserving the autonomy of each constituent union while coordinating national strategy.

The AFL's guiding philosophy, often termed "pure and simple unionism" or "bread-and-butter unionism," concentrated on concrete, achievable objectives: higher wages, shorter hours (the eight-hour day was a central demand), and improved working conditions, secured chiefly through collective bargaining and, where necessary, strikes and boycotts. Gompers consciously rejected radical socialism and independent labor-party politics, preferring instead to "reward friends and punish enemies" by lobbying within the existing two-party system. This pragmatic, non-ideological orientation distinguished the AFL from European labor movements and from American rivals such as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, founded 1905). The federation's exclusionary craft structure, however, largely left out unskilled industrial workers, women, and African Americans, a limitation that would later be challenged.

The AFL grew steadily, claiming over a million members by 1900 and several million by the 1910s, and it gained legitimacy during the Progressive Era and World War I, when Gompers cooperated with the Wilson administration. A key turning point came in 1935 when industrial unionists led by John L. Lewis broke away to form the Committee for Industrial Organization—later the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO)—to organize mass-production workers on an industry-wide rather than craft basis. The Wagner Act (National Labor Relations Act) of 1935 strengthened collective-bargaining rights for both. After two decades of rivalry, the AFL and CIO merged in December 1955 under George Meany to form the AFL–CIO, which remains the principal federation of American labor unions in 2026.

For the FSOT US History section and comparable civil-service papers, the AFL is a high-frequency topic in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era labor cluster. Examiners typically test the contrast between the AFL's craft unionism under Gompers and the Knights of Labor's inclusive "one big union" model, the meaning of "bread-and-butter unionism," and the 1935 AFL–CIO split followed by the 1955 merger. Candidates should be able to associate Samuel Gompers with the AFL's founding date (1886), distinguish its conservative apolitical strategy from the radicalism of the IWW, and place it correctly within the sequence of major American labor organizations. Questions may also pair the AFL with landmark labor legislation such as the Sherman Antitrust Act's early use against unions and the later Wagner Act.